NIH Deputy Director runs Dangerous GoF Research in Humans

And New Year interviews

US vs international media

Carlos Sánchez from Brownstone España interviewed me. Carlos has been reading about this complex subject and asked me astute questions. Notice the trend: Dutch, British, German, Chinese, and Spanish journalists will discuss this sensitive topic with me. Even the WHO in Switzerland would debate the US lab origins of Covid, but US journalists are reluctant.

English interview starts at ~5 minutes.

Carlos writes about One Health on his Subtack:

From an institutional perspective, One Health is integrated into biodefense plans to counter the potential of animal pathogens as biological weapons.

La fábrica de plagas (II): La ruta de la gripe aviar H5N1

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya defends Taubenberger

Jay chose Jeffrey Taubenberger to replace Fauci at NIAID, and his controversial pick awkwardly came up in this interview. Taubenberger was involved in early lab leak cover-up emails with Fauci, Peter Daszak, and David Morens.

The interview didn’t go well because Jay doubled down on defending Taubenberger’s resurrection of the 1918 flu virus, which killed more than World War I.

The above Tweet reminded me of Fauci’s infamous 2011 article:

Podcast Jay

The NIH has been transformed this year. And most of the layoffs, policy changes, and politically motivated funding cuts—notably, to infectious-disease research—have happened under Bhattacharya’s watch. But inside the agency, officials describe Bhattacharya as a largely ineffectual figurehead, often absent from leadership meetings, unresponsive to colleagues, and fixated more on cultivating his media image than on engaging with the turmoil at his own agency. “We don’t really hear from or about Jay very much,” one official told me. (Most of the current and former NIH officials who spoke with me for this article requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation.) Many officials call Bhattacharya “Podcast Jay” because of the amount of time that he has spent in his office recording himself talking. “Bhattacharya is too busy podcasting to do anything,” one official told The Atlantic.

Instead, Matthew Memoli, the agency’s principal deputy director, “is the one wielding the axe,” the official said. This time last year, Memoli was a relatively low-ranking flu researcher at the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Then, in January, the Trump administration appointed him to be the agency’s acting director. At the time, other NIH officials considered Memoli to be a placeholder, temporarily empowered to carry out the administration’s orders. But “there’s been no change since Jay got put in,” one NIH official told The Atlantic. To the agency officials I spoke with, Memoli, now second in command, still looks to be very much in charge.

Podcast Jay interviewed Memoli about his (dangerous GoF) human trails. It appears Memoli’s human volunteers come from the on-campus NIH hospital that offers free healthcare:

Natural origin virologist calls out GoF research

We previously wrote about a love triangle involving Taubenberger, Jay, and his NIH lieutenant, Matt Memoli.

Memoli is portrayed as the “bad cop” of the “Jay and Matt” dyad, whose management style is described as rule by fiat.

Virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen reminds us that Memoli conducts dangerous Gain-of-Function (DGOF) research on humans!!!

Memoli has created and also intentionally infected human volunteers with these supposedly dangerous and potentially pandemic-causing viruses. He then used these humans to select for seasonal flu viruses that evade host immune responses, including to therapeutic antibodies and vaccines. Being Principal Deputy Director of NIH can certainly give you new, tyrannical means of getting a competitive advantage, since you can tank their grants for allegedly doing DGOF that you do yourself (on humans!!!).

Not humanized mice, humans! She reviewed papers authored by the current NIH deputy director, Matt Memoli, that may violate the Trump Executive Order on Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research.

Memoli had conducted extensive research on immune evasion (e.g., asymptomatic spread of COVID). Rasmussen’s Substack speculates that Memoli may have recently canceled a GoF grant because it competed with his immune evasion research.

Since GOF is proclaimed and enforced selectively, I wondered why this grant in particular caught Memoli and Bhattacharya’s merciless gaze. This is not the only research that NIAID funds on seasonal flu, and other labs use similar experimental approaches and address related research hypotheses. Why was this grant singled out?

Perhaps it reminded Memoli too much of his own work! Memoli also studies the impact of HA and NA immunity on virus evolution. He has identified immune escape, multiple antiviral resistance, and virulence mutants and done experimental evolution studies in which he selected them in cell culture and in his own human challenge model.

The last paper mentioned above is the craziest:

DGOF: Uses reconstituted 1918

Hypocrisy Level: Obvious. 1918 was reconstituted twenty years ago, so it stopped being extinct in 2005. These studies are not themselves DGOF, although it’s debatable whether using 1918 at all would qualify, since it was resurrected from sequences using reverse genetics. Bringing back 1918 now, however, would be absolutely forbidden by the Executive Order. What about using 1918 now since it has already been brought back? Grants including 1918 work are likely being evaluated for DGOF compliance on a case by case basis since 1918 is also a Select Agent, but I would be very surprised if many researchers are submitting grants proposing any type of 1918 work. The only researcher in the country whose 1918 research is unaffected may be Taubenberger.

Angela Rasmussen, like most virologists who don’t work in a government lab, has to compete for NIH grants by becoming a great writer. Read the rest here.

Workouts From the Cringe

Immune evasion research links Covid to a vaccine

Former CDC director Robert Redfield repeats his theory of COVID as a contagious vaccine, discusses immune evasion, and Ralph Baric:

Baric even patented what Redfield discussed, a vaccine to “improve or otherwise modulate an immune response in a subject without deleterious effect on the subject.”

Baric’s colleague now runs part of NIAID

Jay and Matt Memoli fired a director within NIAID (DMID, which runs HIV research) and replaced him with David J. Spiro. Spiro is Baric’s GoF colleague from 2010!

Just take any of Baric’s pre-pandemic research, shown above, and cross-reference it with SARS2 symptoms:

Nsp14 was an important piece of Baric’s SARS2 genome and openly discussed pre-pandemic. Here, Baric tells the group in 2013 that we had already performed LAVs, but they reverted, so we used the “nsp14 mutant.”

The meeting above was organized by Fauci in 2013 on the NIH campus. In Chapter 19: The Bethesda Boys, I describe the campus:

In the suburbs of Washington, D.C., lies the semi-autonomous city-state known as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is located in Bethesda, Maryland, just a 30-minute subway ride from the White House and US Capitol building. The NIH campus is a sprawling hub with a shuttle bus service, radio station, police force, Specialized Knowledge and Information Facility (SKIF), and even wild deer roaming its grounds.

NIH funds play a global role, supporting two-thirds of all HIV research and half of the worldwide research on neglected diseases like SARS. As the largest funder of biomedical research worldwide, its $50 billion budget rivals the top 10 military budgets globally.

Politically entrenched, the NIH operates as a potent institution in Washington, D.C. Its directors bypass presidential oversight, directly lobbying Congress for funding. Tony Fauci once referred to this approach as “busting the budget,” recognizing its controversial political implications. Critics have characterized the NIH grantmaking process as “inbred, political, and self-reinforcing,” often favoring established researchers and institutions, which perpetuates a hierarchy that can stifle innovation and diversity in research.

In the 1980s, NIH grants funded two-year-old ideas. By the 2010s, these ideas were often seven years old, reflecting the centralized scientific decision-making culture at the Bethesda campus. Francis Collins, who led the NIH during the SARS2 outbreak, personified this approach. During the February 1, 2020 teleconference, international scientists called Collins and Fauci the “Bethesda boys.”

Ironically, the two vs. the seven-year-old grant quote was from Jay’s research. I never knew where the $50 billion NIH budget started, but a D.C. think tank said it was the Space Race:

Mission Lost: How NIH Leaders Stole Its Promise to America

The NIH describes its mission as to advance research that will “enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness” for Americans. But is NIH delivering on that promise? That worthy objective has worked to insulate the NIH from scrutiny of its spending by both the executive branch and Congress, leading to an ever- growing budget over the past six decades. Yet, this increased spending has been accompanied by a slowdown in the improvement of longevity, which has grown only half as fast as before.

The United States government’s 150-year history of modest funding of peacetime research ended on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. That traumatized America. As President Lyndon B Johnson later recalled that day, “Now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed almost alien. I also remember the profound shock of realizing that it might be possible for another nation to achieve technological superiority over this great country of ours.”

In 1958, in urgent response to Sputnik and its associated challenges, the federal government launched three vast initiatives and three smaller but still large ones:

1. NASA was created to challenge the Russians in space.

2. The National Defense Education Act was passed to boost the education of many more scientists.

3. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (later DARPA) was created

4. After 1958, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) budgets were increased manyfold. The NSF was deemed to have failed America—the Russians were in space!—but over the next few years, its budgets were nevertheless increased nearly 10-fold to boost the training of scientists and reinforce the National Defense Education Act of 1958.

5. The Small Business Investment Act of 1958

6. Although NIH was not directly tied to the space program, the general flurry of activity to close the science gap with the Soviet Union resulted in a fourfold increase in the NIH budget in four years.

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2025-11/Working-Paper-85.pdf

Baric and Fauci on Feb 1 teleconference

On January 31, 2020, Fauci was told that SARS2 “looks engineered.” But Fauci already knew this, as he had funded Baric’s DARPA Defuse. Dr. Meryl Nass addressed an Italian audience about what happened next.

These guys openly joke about Baric